Epi­demi­ol­o­gist Dr Av­ery Hinds is con­fi­dent that T&T's health sys­tem is ready to deal with any in­crease in the spread of the Delta vari­ant or an­oth­er vari­ant of the COVID-19 that ar­rives in T&T. Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer Dr Roshan Paras­ram said that as of Fri­day, Min­istry of Health of­fi­cials con­firmed ten ad­di­tion­al cas­es of the Delta vari­ant of con­cern. The to­tal con­firmed Delta cas­es now stand at 42. Ac­cord­ing to the in­for­ma­tion Paras­ram gaves at the Min­istry of Health's vir­tu­al press con­fer­ence on Sat­ur­day, there are Delta vari­ant cas­es con­firmed in every coun­ty in the coun­try in­clud­ing To­ba­go.

“It is as wide­spread as it can be. We are try­ing to iden­ti­fy ar­eas of con­cern and these are all ar­eas of T&T. We have two cas­es from St George Cen­tral, two from St George East, three from St An­drews/St David, two from Ca­roni, and one from the Nar­i­va/Ma­yaro area.”

He not­ed that most of the Delta vari­ant cas­es so far have been mild.

Hinds said, “All of the cau­tions that we con­tin­ue to en­cour­age are cau­tions that are meant to re­duce the risk of and to damp­en the rate of any po­ten­tial surge. So we are hop­ing that the pop­u­la­tion un­der­stands that we need to con­tin­ue what we have been ad­vo­cat­ing to re­duce the risk of the surge. The health sys­tem has been or­gan­ised with a par­al­lel health sys­tem to take care of the in­crease in any COVID-19 cas­es. Our health sys­tem stands ready.”

Pro­fes­sor of Mol­e­c­u­lar Ge­net­ics and Vi­rol­o­gy Chris­tine Car­ring­ton who was al­so present at the vir­tu­al press con­fer­ence spoke about dif­fer­ent vari­ants of the COVID-19.

“To date in T&T, we have de­tect­ed three to four vari­ants of con­cern that are recog­nised by the World Health Or­ga­ni­za­tion (WHO) and these are the Al­pha, Be­ta, Delta and Gam­ma and to date. We have de­tect­ed Al­pha, Gam­ma and Delta in T&T. Of those, we have ev­i­dence of com­mu­ni­ty spread of the Gam­ma and Delta vari­ants. The Gam­ma was de­tect­ed sev­er­al months ago and more re­cent­ly we had ev­i­dence of com­mu­ni­ty spread of the Delta vari­ant which re­search sug­gests is more eas­i­ly spread from per­son to per­son. There is al­so ev­i­dence that those who con­tract the Delta vari­ant are at high­er risks of ex­pe­ri­enc­ing se­vere dis­ease and of be­ing hos­pi­talised.”